That scene is a decent metaphor for my job writing the Interpreter: to see something weird, extraordinary, or even frightening, and try to open it up to understand its inner workings. What is the internal mechanism, and how is it powered? How long has it been like that, and where did it come from?
My main way to answer that question is through reporting — a mix of going to see things myself, and calling other people to ask what they know. But my reading habits come from the same impulse of wanting to figure out how things work, to pick them up, flip open doors, and ask “how is this accomplished?”
My Snob Summer reading, as I’ve mentioned before, arises out of an abiding interest in how status influences behavior — the “how is this accomplished” of ambition and betrayal. The plots of those books are usually driven by some sort of thwarted expectation — a violation of the rules of who is above whom, or a sudden inversion of the social pecking order.
C.S. Lewis’s famous speech “The Inner Ring” addresses the informal, unwritten hierarchies that exercise power in almost every institution, and the perils of being guided by desire to gain admittance to inner sanctums. It works as decoder ring for snob fiction:
“I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.”
This week, as planned, I flipped a coin and then read “The Beach at Summerly,” by Beatriz Williams, an upstairs/downstairs drama with a fun spy twist, and plenty of snob-lit themes. I also found a gift from my past self: a copy of “A Delicate Truth” by John le Carré, which I’d apparently bought years ago but never read.
Le Carré, to my mind, is one of the masters of snob fiction; nearly every one of his books is about the assumptions people make based on money and class, and the terrible consequences that arise when those assumptions prove misleading. (The Times recently featured a great run-down of his essential books, by Sam Adler-Bell.)
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